RATIONALE AND EFFICACY OF A TACTILE KINESTHETIC TREATMENT FOR ALEXIA

Patients with pure alexia typically read words by first naming each le tter of the word, either aloud or silently, These patients do not show signs of phonological alexia (poor pseudoword and functor reading). P atient T.L., a pure alexic patient with poor letter-naming abilities, had marked difficulty reading functors and pseudowords, but not spelli ng them or identifying them when they were spelled to him, a pattern w hich has been called 'modality-specific phonological alexia'. We used a multiple-baseline design to evaluate a tactile-kinaesthetic treatmen t programme designed to improve T.L.'s letter-naming, thus enabling hi m to read in letter-by-letter fashion. Results showed that the treatme nt was efficacious, with a 51% improvement achieved in trained word re ading and a 40% increase in untrained word reading. Furthermore, the p art-of-speech effect was no longer significant following treatment, a result that our hypothesis of T.L.'s underlying impairment predicted.